Automotive Body Kit Development Process

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Body Kits are a great way to improve the look of your vehicle. Either your vehicle is a truck or sports car; various aftermarket body kits are made to upgrade the look of your vehicle. Manufactures such as Wings West, Extreme Dimensions, VIS and Razzi make body kits from most vehicles on the road. These manufactures of gained much recognition in the aftermarket scene and can be trusted for quality and good fitment.
Body kits come in parts. These parts include: front bumper, side skirts, and rear bumpers. Sometimes body kits may include other pieces such as hoods, fenders and trunk lids. 4 piece body kit is the most popular.
Most body kits are made from either fiberglass or polyurethane. Fiberglass is more brittle and can crack on high impact. Plastic or polyurethane is much more flexible and is similar to the material used on OEM bumpers. However, polyurethane is almost twice as expensive and for that reason fiberglass is preferred. A new material designed by Extreme Dimensions called DuraFlex is based on fiberglass with added materials that makes it more flexible. This material is known to be lighter than polyurethane, be more flexible than fiberglass and cost much less than plastics.
Body kits are almost always delivered by truck freight because of the size. UPS simply cannot deliver such large items. Furthermore, special care is needed to insure they don’t crack. If you order a body kit, it is important that you verify the contents of your shipment before signing and accepting your packages from the specialty delivery trucks.
Installation of body kits is fairly straight forward. The hardest part if getting your parts painted correctly and removing your original parts. Once your car is stripped from its original bumpers (if you purchased a complete bumper and not a lip) the new body kit bumpers and side skirts can be mounted using original fastening methods or revised depending on the car and body kit your installing.

Frank Toussi
Auto Direct carries the largest selection of body kits, spoilers and other accessories. They provide 24-7 technical support for their customers.

For the item no. 1 the cost very exspansive. For the medium company normally choose option no. 2 if the have in house modelling.

For the Clay/ Hard modelling, its will take 3 to 4 week to complete the whole body kit. But the process more enjoyable we can play around with the clay. Some time rendering fake but not the clay we can feel the design and touch the styling.

Top images show the modeller patch the clay to the car body until the certain high archive depend of the styling.Bottom view the modeller sculpting or shaping the clay guide by designer and rendering image.

below the clay +resin complete with base colour ready to review with customer

After customer agree we move to next step mould fabrication.

RRIM Mould Design Stage.

We need to scan the prototype to genarate 3D data. On this stage cad designer will design class A surface and ED (engineering design).

Image below shown digitizing data(cloud of point). Cad designer will generate the surface and cloud of point as a guide.Image no.2 shown line intersection between C.O.P with plane. Rough surface already seen. In this stage mounting strategy will counting into the design.

After completion Cad designer assembly all part to body vehicle and review with team and customer after all team agree, all 3d data will sent to mould maker to fabricate mould.

Sample rear skirt mould images.

Image below shown the front skirt after demould after this the part need 3 days curing process before sent to painting.

After painting we assembly the part to the vehicle and final review with customer. below images shown the part fitting with the vehicle.

Avery automotive manufacturer have their own spec but almost 70% are same. As a vendor to fulfill their requirement is must. This body kit need to run the test before can sale. They test are,

humidity test.

endurance test 25000km.

heat thermal test.

wet out test and and etc.

After the test pass the car with full body kit will launch. This video shown slam test for the rear spoiler. The test run 70,000 slam if the spoiler detach that consider fail